Heidi MacDonald alerted me to the fact that Publishers Weekly just ran a review of Arf Forum on their “PW Comics” website. I’ve taken the liberty of reprinting the text below.
(order Arf Forum here)
“Readers will find this book doing strange and wonderful things to their minds. Imagine someone going through old magazines and stopping whenever an unusual picture or story catches his attention. Then imagine this reader taking the time to cut out the oddities and stick them in a file folder. And finally imagine someone selecting the most unusual, striking things out of a drawer filled with such folders and printing them in an elegantly designed, lovingly printed anthology. Arf Forum features Max Ernst’s surrealist collages (a man with the head of an Easter Island statue cavorting in various melodramatic scenes) as well as a sleazy photo story from the early 1940s about a visit to a comics studio where girls pose in their underwear.
“Yoe’s warm memoir of a meeting with cartoonist Bill Holman (Smokey Stover) shows the modern audience how dazzling this comic strip was, while a piece about ultra-obscure artist William Ekgren (known only for three covers) offers a tantalizing glimpse of an unfulfilled talent.
“Yoe fills this volume to the gills: Stan Lee on irate readers, Italian cartoonist Kremos’s girly cartoons, a photo of Elvis reading a Betty and Veronica comic. There’s no overall theme here except “Isn’t this cool!” but that’s enough; it is cool”.
MONDAY MORNING
“Where did we leave off yesterday?”
“At home, boss, don’t you remember?”
Above: Elvis reads Betty and Veronica on his first major tour, part of the many images of people reading comics in Arf Forum.
As the girl said in the movie Pee Wee Herman’s Big Adventure, “Thanks P.W.!” I’m interested in hearing indivduals reactions to the latest Arf book, too. Send them to yoecomix(at)hotmail(dot)com and I’ll run the letters on the blog.
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